Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine Evaristo

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      there is Nawi’s death

      lights slowly fading

      to blackout

      Amma wishes Dominique could have flown over to see a play she was the first to read ten years ago when Amma wrote it

      a play that’s taken this long to get staged because every company she sent it to turned it down as not being right for them

      and she couldn’t bear the thought of resurrecting Bush Women Theatre to put it on

      when Dominique left, she was left to steer the battleship alone

      which she did for a few years, feeling abandoned, never finding someone to replace Dominique who had provided the practical solutions to Amma’s creative ideas

      she dismantled the company in the end

      and went freelance

      Shirley

      her oldest friend will be here tonight, she’s attended every one of Amma’s shows since she was a teenager, has been a constant in her life since they met as eleven-year-olds at grammar school when Shirley, the only other brown girl in the school, made a beeline for her in the playground when Amma was standing alone one lunchtime amid the excitement of green-uniformed girls screeching and whooping and having fun skipping with ropes and playing hopscotch and games of tag

      there was Shirley standing before her

      Shirley, with perfectly straightened hair, her face so shiny (Vaseline, Amma later discovered), with her perfectly-knotted school tie, white socks pulled up to her knees

      so composed, so neat, so nice-looking

      unlike Amma’s own messy hair, mainly because she was unable to stop unpicking the two braids her mother plaited for her every morning

      or stop her socks slipping down to her ankles because she couldn’t help rubbing one foot against the other leg

      and her school cardigan was three sizes too big because her mother had made it to last three years

      hello, she said, my name’s Shirley, do you want me to be your friend?

      Amma nodded, Shirley took her hand and led her to the group she’d just left who were playing rubber band skipping

      they were inseparable after that, Shirley paid attention in class and could be relied on to help out with homework

      Shirley listened for hours to Amma talking about the crushes she had on boys, and later, after a transitional bisexual period (with brief crushes on Shirley’s brothers Errol and Tony), girls

      Shirley never had a negative word to say about her sexuality, covered for her when she bunked off school and listened avidly to her tales from the youth theatre – the smoking, snogging, drinking, acting – in that order, even when their paths forked after school, Shirley into teaching, Amma into theatre, they maintained their friendship

      and even when Amma’s arty friends said Shirley was the dullest person on the planet and did she have to invite her? Amma stood up for Shirley’s ordinariness

      she’s a good person, she protested

      Shirley babysat Yazz whenever she was asked (Amma also babysat Shirley’s girls once or twice, maybe?)

      Shirley never once complained when Amma needed to borrow money to pay off her debts, which she sometimes wrote off as birthday presents

      it felt one-way for a long time, until Amma reasoned she made Shirley’s safe and predictable life more interesting and scintillating

      and that was what she gave back

      then there were the members of her group or squad, as Yazz corrects her, no one says group of friends, Mum, it’s so, like, prehistoric?

      she misses the people they used to be, when they were all discovering themselves with no idea how much they might change in the years to come

      her group came to her opening nights, were at the end of a phone (landline, of course – how did that work back then?) for a spontaneous night out

      were there to share and stir-up dramas

      Mabel was a freelance photographer who went straight once she hit her thirties, ditched all her lesbian friends as part of her reinvention

      as probably the first black, Barbour-wearing, horse-riding housewife in the Shires

      Olivine went from being un-castable in Britain because she was so dark to landing a major crime series in Hollywood and living the life of a star with ocean views and glossy magazine spreads

      Katrina was a nurse who returned to Aberdeen where she belonged, she said, became a born-again Anglophile, married Kirsty, a doctor, and refuses to come down to London

      Lakshmi will be here tonight, a saxophonist who composed for their shows, before deciding there was nothing worse than a song and a tune and began to put the niche into avant garde and play what Amma privately thinks of as bing-bang-bong music, usually headlining weird festivals in remote fields with more cows than punters in attendance

      Lakshmi has also developed an improbable guru persona for the gullible students she tutors at music college

      who gather around the hearth of her council flat sipping cheap cider from tea cups

      while she sits cross-legged on the sofa in flowing robes, long hair streaked with silver

      denouncing chord progressions in favour of micro-tonal improvisation and poly-tempic, poly-rhythmic and multi-phonic structures and effects

      while declaring that composition is dead, girls and boys

      I’m all about the contemporary extemporary

      even though Lakshmi is approaching sixty, her chosen lover, male or female, remains in the 25–35 age range, at the upper end of which the relationship ends

      when Amma calls her on it, she comes up with a reason other than that they’re no longer quite so impressionable, fresh-faced and taut-skinned

      then there was Georgie, the only one who didn’t survive into the nineties

      a plumber’s apprentice from Wales, she was abandoned by her Jehovah’s Witness family for being gay

      she became the lost orphan child they all took under their wing

      the only woman in a council’s plumbing team, she had to endure constant innuendo from her male colleagues with their jokes about screw hole locators, blow bags, nipples and ballcocks

      as well as comments on what they’d like to do with her arse when she was fixing something under a sink or peering down a gutter

      Georgie

      drank two litres of Coca Cola СКАЧАТЬ